We built the number, then took responsibility for it.

Motor total losses in Germany and Italy are settled on a residual value that is hard to predict and easy to get wrong. The claimant keeps the vehicle, the insurer never takes title, and the figure that decides the payout is whatever the available bidders happened to offer that week. Plenty of capable people have tried to model it; the reason it resists is that the outcome depends as much on which buyers saw the vehicle as on the vehicle itself.

We started on the demand side, connecting European buyers to damaged vehicles they could not otherwise reach. That work produced something more useful than the marketplace itself: a growing record of what these vehicles actually realised. Prism, our residual-value model, is trained on that record — realised outcomes, not appraiser estimates — and BidLens turns the same data into buyer economics across 14 markets.

Today the prediction is the product. PrismScope returns the cross-platform maximum in seconds, with a confidence range around it, and we publish how accurate it is including where it is weakest. Where an insurer wants to act on the figure, we commit to buy the vehicle at it and carry the resale ourselves.

How we handle evidence

Every figure on this site is either measured on realised outcomes or labelled as modelled. Accuracy is reported out-of-sample — tested on claims removed from the training data — because an in-sample fit only tells you a model memorised its own history. Where a figure comes from a customer's book it is aggregated and the customer is not identified. Where an assumption is doing work, we say which assumption and how much of the number depends on it.

We think this is the boring part of the business and also the part that decides it. A residual-value figure that cannot survive an actuary reading the footnote is not worth quoting.

The settlement process underneath

Alongside the model there is a second asset that is easier to overlook and harder to build: a working cross-border settlement process. Funds held by a regulated payment provider and released on completion, identity checks on every counterparty, and title and export documentation handled inside the transaction rather than left to the buyer afterwards.

It matters for two reasons. It is what allows a buyer in another country to bid at his real number instead of discounting for risk — which is where most of the additional value in these vehicles actually comes from. And it is what makes a purchase commitment more than a sentence: we can say we will buy the vehicle and pay for it because the machinery to do that already runs.

It is also the half of this business that a distributor with a large buyer base does not have. Demand and a settlement process are different things to build, and whoever holds only one of them needs the other.

Where we operate

Germany is the primary market. Italy shares the same ownership structure, so the product needs no redesign there and pilots are under way. France works differently — the insurer acquires the vehicle — and needs a different product, so it comes later.